I'd say ear players tend to get the feel of a tune better than pure readers. However I'm biased, I consider myself fortunate to have pretty good ears and bearable reading ability. If I have to play from music, if it's an arrangement of a tune I know I tend to play what I think it should sound like and use the music as a second line of defence.

An issue I have with a lot of transcriptions Is that they can be inaccurate to a lesser or greater degree. I really noticed this with a book of Elton John songs where the written music was clearly different to the original record. Not usually hugely, but nevertheless different.

Nevertheless, what this music book did was train my ears. I originally bought the book because, like Bachus, I found it hard to "decode" some of the more non-standard chords. As a direct result of playing the music as written, whether I ultimately agreed with the transcription or not, I was playing some interesting chords and inversions (9ths, 11ths, 13ths, flattened / sharpened additional notes, bass not not necessarily having a lot to do with the right hand, etc etc) and now I find there are very few chords that I have problems decoding.